Work continues slowly and steadily. At the moment, Uncle Walt is throwing out vignettes of hunters, canal boys, seamen, spinsters and prostitutes. I’ve addressed this longish stretch by drawing a series of faces that are specific yet still act as emblems, like Roman ancestral death masks. Seemed a good opportunity to quietly allude to the ancestor worship of that earlier republic. I’m at the end of this stretch now, so we’re veering back into metaphysical territory, which means we’ll see the imagery get a bit more surreal again at this point. During the course of drawing these pages, I often vacillate between the straightforward, the allegorical and the surreal–mainly because Walt does. Walt contains multitudes, so you have to follow suit.